About Me

Mitch Wheat has been working as a professional programmer since 1984, graduating with a honours degree in Mathematics from Warwick University, UK in 1986. He moved to Perth in 1995, having worked in software houses in London and Rotterdam. He has worked in the areas of mining, electronics, research, defence, financial, GIS, telecommunications, engineering, and information management.
Mitch has worked mainly with Microsoft technologies (since Windows version 3.0) but has also used UNIX. He holds the following Microsoft certifications: MCPD (Web and Windows) using C# and SQL Server MCITP (Admin and Developer). His preferred development environment is C#, .Net Framework and SQL Server. Mitch has worked as an independent consultant for the last 10 years, and is currently involved with helping teams improve their Software Development Life Cycle. His areas of special interest lie in performance tuning

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Downloadable content from Bioware/EA

If you have a game from Bioware or EA (Such as Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age) and you are having trouble accessing the in-game downloadable content (you get the unhelpful message "you are not connected to the internet"), the tech support help is a bit hit and miss! Somehow, the manual is missing magic port numbers and tech support don’t tell you about it.

You must unblock ports 80 (TCP/UDP), 8000 (TCP), 8001 (UDP), 443 (TCP), and 18081 (TCP) to access the downloadable content.[18081 isn't listed in the manual or on the website, but the game tries to contact an EA server on that port. 443 isn't listed either, but that's a regular https port and is most likely unblocked on most systems.]

If that doesn’t work for you, download and install WireShark, fire up the game and see what port accesses are being attempted.